Michelle Vernal Box Set

by Michelle Vernal

  Rebecca sat a bit taller hearing that but then was distracted by a phone announcing the arrival of a text message. All three women reached for their handbags and began rifling through them, but it was Rebecca who held hers aloft triumphantly before scrolling down her messages.

  “Who is it from?” Melissa asked sulkily, tossing her red leather Balenciaga bag over the side of the couch as though it were worth no more than a plastic supermarket bag. A mute Rebecca squeaked a reply as her face went white upon reading the message. Melissa didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure out that whatever had just been conveyed to her friend wasn’t good.

  Unsure of what to do, Rebecca only knew that she needed a moment on her own, preferably with a large glass of something alcoholic. “Excuse me for a minute, Betty. I don’t feel too good.” Her legs carried her through to the kitchen on automatic pilot, and then flinging open the fridge, she poured the remains of the bottle of wine into a glass. Gulping its contents down, she banged the empty glass down on the bench, half expecting its stem to shatter.

  “Are you alright, Becs?” Melissa appeared in the doorway, her expression anxious. Leaning back against the kitchen bench, Rebecca wrapped her arms protectively around herself and took a deep breath.

  “Those texts were from Derbhilla. She said she didn’t want to be the one to have to tell me but that she felt that it was better coming from her.”

  “What, for goodness’ sake?” Melissa urged.

  She licked her suddenly dry lips. “It would appear that my boss struck it lucky on Ladies Day.”

  “Ciaran? Who with?”

  “None other than the Queen of Lycra.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “But you more or less told me you weren’t interested in him anymore, so why the drama?”

  Melissa’s question was loaded, and Rebecca felt a surge of anger at her that she was taking such a hard line. “Because it was with that cow and because, oh, I don’t bloody know.” She ran out of the kitchen, through the lounge, and took the stairs two at a time.

  A bewildered Betty watched her go, her matronly features creased in concern. “I don’t know,” she muttered to the empty room as she shook her head. “These young girls and their dramas. I’m glad I’m past all that.”

  REBECCA PRETENDED SHE was asleep when Melissa came up to bed; she didn’t want to talk. All she wanted to do was lick her wounds privately because it stung that Ciaran had slept with a woman who yearned to be Rachel Hunter but resembled Mariah Carey on a very bad hair day. And why did it hurt so much? It wasn’t that she fancied Ciaran. No, she had been there and done that—or rather, done him—so no, that couldn’t be it. After all, she had David to ogle over now. Still, it was only natural to have a teensy bit of affection for someone whom one worked so closely alongside. She shivered at the memory of that one night they had shared together. It had been so very good. Even if Ciaran felt the same way, she knew he would never act on it, not with his PA. The fact he hadn’t even bothered to phone her afterward to ask why she had sneaked out the way she had the morning after proved that. He had simply shown up at work on the following Monday and acted as though it was business as usual. The simple truth of the matter was that he relied on her professionally. Far too much so to ruin their working relationship with a romp. Besides, if he could sleep with the likes of Pariah, then it showed what kind of girl he wanted—certainly not Rebecca. White stilettos and a big hair kind of a gal she was not! Nope; she had to let it go and focus her energies on David.

  Staring up into the darkness, she realised her return ticket had her scheduled to fly out a week from today. By then she’d have been away for nearly two weeks. It had seemed like a lifetime in purgatory initially when she’d booked the ticket. The thing was, though, she wasn’t so sure that she wanted to fly out anymore and not just because Jennifer so obviously needed her around. What was there for her to go back to now?

  Her brows knitted together in a Botox-inducing frown; she wasn’t sure if she could face working for Ciaran anymore. The flirty banter that had made her job fun would be meaningless now that she knew there was no chance of it ever spilling over into something deeper. Forcing her eyes shut, she tried to banish the images of that night, but they kept coming, and she found herself back at Ciaran’s apartment.

  Their first kiss had been soft, searching almost. It had grown in its intensity as Ciaran, gaining in confidence, had unwrapped his strong arms from around her and begun to explore. Those long, shapely fingers she’d admired so often as they scribbled out memos, or typed emails, were at last reaching out—touching, stroking—and it had been exquisite. She shivered, giving herself over to the memory as she smiled into the darkness at what came next: two bodies entwined as one—hot despite the chill.

  THE SATURDAY MORNING cartoons were in full swing, occupying the children when Rebecca mooched through to join Melissa, who was sitting in the sunroom enjoying the unexpected winter bonus of sunshine.

  Melissa looked at her friend hopefully. “Do you fancy a spot of people-watching? There’re all sorts of new cafés that have opened in the village since I was last here, and it might take your mind off you-know-who.”

  “Mm, sounds good.” She had woken up determined to be cheery and not to think about Ciaran. One depressed sister in the Loughton family was enough, and she had already promised Jen she would take the children off her hands for the day. “We should make the most of the weather. There’s that little park down by the water; maybe we could grab a couple of takeaway lattes while the kids have a play?”

  Melissa frowned. That wasn’t quite what she had in mind. Instead, she’d been picturing herself crossing her legs seductively outside a Parisian-style café while men stumbled over themselves at the vision, sipping her milky latte made with trim milk, of course. Sitting on the damp grass watching squealing prepubescents at play was not her idea of fun. Still, she liked to think she was a good sport and so, getting up from her seat, she went in search of her jacket. The weather was far too nice to be in a bad mood. Lattes to go would have to do.

  They managed to drag the children away from the television and out the front door, to herd them into the Land Cruiser. Indicating left onto Rue Lavaud and cruising slowly down the main road, they were amazed by the amount of people out and about. “Where have they all come from? Bloody day-trippers,” Rebecca muttered like a local as, with no parks in sight, she indicated right onto Rue Jolie. “We’ll try for a park up here. We should have walked. Serves us right for being so lazy.”

  “I don’t do walking, Becs; you know that. What’s the point in spending ages getting ready just to get all hot and sweaty before you get to wherever it is you’re going? There’s one, there!”

  With the children clapping in the back seat and Melissa making mutterings about the f****** Brady Bunch, Rebecca executed a perfect parallel park.

  “Where’d you learn how to do that?” Melissa was impressed.

  “Dad—it was a male pride thing. He reckoned if God couldn’t see fit to give him a son, then it was up to him to make sure his daughters knew how to parallel park like men.”

  “I’ll be telling your dad he’s a sexist old fart next time I see him.”

  “I wouldn’t bother; I’ve been telling him that for years. Come on, kids. Let’s go.”

  They wandered towards the Saturday morning hub at a companionable snail’s pace thanks to Hannah, who refused to go in her stroller, opting for the independence of toddling instead. Her brother kept himself two steps ahead.

  “It is gorgeous here,” Melissa said as, turning onto Rue Lavaud, they were met with the stunning vista of French Bay’s blue water sparkling in the sunshine. Up ahead, the boulevard was teeming with people, a vibrant mix of backpackers, tour groups, families, and locals. They joined the throng and had only been ambling along for a few minutes when Melissa nudged Rebecca sharply. The third woman they’d seen on their short trip thus far passed by them dressed in nautical stripes, white slacks, and
tennis shoes. She had what seemed to be a requisite yapping poodle attached to a long lead.

  “Spooky. Do you think they’re clones?” she whispered, and Rebecca giggled. “Shoot me if you ever catch me contemplating blue and white stripes.”

  As they passed the first of many eateries, the cry went up: “Can I have an ice cream, Auntie Becca?” Jack’s face was hopeful, and his sister began chanting, “Icecweam, icecweam.”

  “It’s a bit cold for ice cream, isn’t it?” Even before the words had finished flowing from her mouth, she knew they sounded ridiculous. When, as a child, had she ever thought it was too cold for ice cream? The children obviously thought the same as they chorused “No!” like a polished double act.

  “Oh, I suppose so then. What flavour do you want?”

  Bad move because UN-style deliberations followed over ice cream flavours until she told them that if they didn’t make their minds up in the next ten seconds she’d make them up for them. It worked.

  “Melissa, what do you want?” Rebecca asked, pushing open a nearby coffee shop’s door.

  “A trim latte, please,” she answered, sitting down outside the café with the children to wait.

  “Such a good night; man, I need a sausage roll.”

  Melissa looked up as a group of pretty, young girls looking worse for wear, staggered past her with the hems of their jeans scuffing the pavement. Those were the days, she thought, feeling a flare of nostalgia when I could put away a pie and a sausage roll without it going straight to my hips. Her train of thought was interrupted by a high-pitched whine coming from a little boy who looked to be a year or two older than Jack.

  “Dad, I wanna see the dolphins now. You said we could.” He was one of those funny-looking kids with an adult face. Come to think of it, there was something about that face.

  She looked closer as the boy tugged at his father, who was doing his best to ignore him. Behind them, a haggard woman with over-bleached hair pushed a buggy containing a wailing baby. Happy families, she thought smugly, shifting her sights to her two charges who were on best behaviour as they awaited their ice cream. The father’s gaze flicked over her with the practiced habit of a man who checks every woman out. He obviously liked what he saw, she thought huffily—a right Merv the Perv. There was something about him as well, though. “Omigod!” She inhaled deeply, flapping her hand as though it were an imaginary fan. “Jeremy Thompson. I don’t believe it!”

  As she pushed open the café door, Rebecca registered three things, as Hannah’s single scoop, orange choc-chip simultaneously slid from her grasp to land with a splat at her feet:

  1. Melissa was talking to a man.

  2. The man just happened to be Rebecca’s first love.

  3. At the sight of her ice cream lying forlornly on the asphalt, Hannah had begun to scream.

  “SO WHAT HAPPENED THEN?” Jennifer asked, referring to Rebecca’s first sighting of Jeremy Thompson. The girls had arrived back from town, children in tow, to find Jennifer curled up on the couch once more. At least she’d run a brush through her hair, Rebecca thought, perching on the end of the couch as she began filling her in on the morning events.

  “Not a lot really. Jeremy said hi and asked me how I’ve been. I said fine and asked him what he was doing in Akaroa, and he said they were just over for the night. Then his wife, who looked totally fed up with her lot, gave him a shove so he introduced her. Vanessa or Veronica, something like that. I can’t remember what his kids were called.” She waved her hand disinterestedly and then smiled. “He asked if Hannah and Jack were mine and looked pissed off when I told him Melissa and I were footloose and fancy-free, living it up in Dublin.”

  “Good one.” Jennifer managed to raise a smile at this one-upmanship.

  “After that, we all just eyeballed each other until Hannah’s screaming got too much. I said it was good to see him but that I’d better go and get another ice cream before she committed harikari.”

  “Remember when you met him, Becs?” Melissa forged her way into Rebecca’s past.

  “How could I forget? He broke my heart.”

  “I never heard that story. Tell me what happened,” Jennifer urged, sitting up, glad to have her mind taken off her problems for a short while.

  Rebecca slid down onto the couch and, leaning back into the leather cushions next to her sister, began relaying her tale. “Well, we were fourteen—you’d left home by then.”

  “Only just. I moved into that awful flat with Tessa, the waitress from Sophia’s, and her friend who was at Polytech doing something or other.” Jennifer shivered at the memory of the cold and damp weatherboard house that had given her her first taste of freedom.

  “That’s right—that place was a hovel. Okay, so it was our first school disco, and it was a huge event on our teenage social calendars, wasn’t it, Melissa?”

  Melissa’s silent nod reiterated this fact.

  “We’d spent weeks planning our outfits.” Rebecca smiled, flashing back to a bygone era of big hair and blusher as she described the black tube-skirts with white shirts and black ties they’d settled on. “I dressed my outfit up with black fishnets and flat ballerina-style shoes.”

  “And I put a big side bow in my hair, Madonna-style,” Melissa interrupted, laughing out loud at the memory.

  “Ah, the eighties—I remember them well.” Jennifer looked nostalgic. “I loved Culture Club and Cyndi Lauper.” She began humming “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Rebecca couldn’t help but wonder at the irony in her sister’s choice of song and Jennifer, for her part, was aware her sister was looking at her with a perplexed expression. She stopped humming and, tucking the hair that had fallen across her face behind her ears, mumbled, “Sorry—carry on with your story.”

  “We were nervous, weren’t we?” There was another silent nod of agreement from Melissa and Rebecca’s eyes took on a dreamy quality as she got caught up in her story once more. “It was as if we knew it was going to be a special night before we even got there. Remember how we stood in your mum and dad’s room doing those Tai Chi moves you got out of a Cosmopolitan magazine to calm our nerves?”

  Melissa grinned. “That’s right, and then just before we got in the car, we stood with our arms around each other in front of Mum’s full-length mirror and shouted, ‘Looking good! Feeling great!’”

  “Affirmations,” Rebecca explained, “and a fat lot of good they did.”

  Stepping back in time and into the darkened school hall, Rebecca could almost taste the atmosphere that had been electric with music and hormones. “The DJ was our geology teacher, Mr Duncan, or Spunky Dunky as we used to call him.” Melissa grinned at the analogy. “I can still hear Spunky Dunky announcing in a proper DJ voice that he was going to play the current number-one hit throughout the nation—Madonna’s ‘Material Girl.’ Of course we all went mad with excitement; Madonna was just the ultimate in cool, you understand, and as I stood up to do my robot moves, Jeremy Thompson appeared in front of me.”

  She paused for a minute, heightening the drama. “Oh Jen,” she gushed, “you should have seen him; he was gorgeous. He had a look of John Taylor—remember him from Duran Duran?—about him.”

  “I was always a Simon Le Bon girl myself, but I wish I had seen him.” Jennifer looked sad at the realisation that she had probably been oblivious of a lot of the monumental events in her sister’s life over the years. She had been far too caught up in what was going on in her own. For a moment, Rebecca held her gaze, trying to work out the underlying meaning behind Jennifer’s words before carrying on.

  “He had the softest brown hair with a bleach-blond fringe that flopped down, on purpose, over one eye and he was wearing these hip, baggy, bop pants with a pink shirt.” She sighed wistfully. “We made a striking couple on the dance floor.”

  “They did,” Melissa affirmed emphatically.

  “I’m not arguing.” Jennifer held her hand up in self-defence.

  “We danced the night away, only stopping when we were asked
to clear the floor and let the fourth-form bop group do their moonwalk display. The night just flew, and I couldn’t believe it when Spunky Dunky announced the last song. It still sends a shiver down my spine when I hear it—New Order’s ‘Blue Monday.’ I’ve got goosebumps just thinking about what happened next—look.” She pulled up her sleeve and held out her arm to prove it.

  “What happened?” Jen was on the edge of the couch, and even Melissa, who knew the story of old, was sitting forward in anticipation.

  “He took my black lace fingerless gloved hand in his and kissed me, ever so softly.”

  “Tongues?” Melissa always asked this, even though she knew the answer.

  “No.”

  “Good,” said Jennifer, unable to stomach the idea of her then fourteen-year-old sister French kissing a randy teenage boy.

  “Tell her what he said to you, Becs,” Melissa urged, almost in a trance by now.

  “He pulled away from me gently, looked into my eyes, and said, ‘You’re beautiful. How come I have never noticed you before?’ I smiled up at him. I mean, what was I supposed to say to that? Then, he made all my high school fantasies come true by asking me if I would go round with him.”

  Melissa wrapped her arms around herself, caught up in the moment. “What did you say?”

  Rebecca played the game. “Yes, of course! I floated home that night. Not literally; Dad picked us up—eleven o’clock curfew and all that.”

  “Hey, don’t complain—you had it easy. I’d already carved the way for you,” Jennifer interjected. She thought back to the explosive rows she’d had with Pamela and Dick in her teenage bids for more freedom.

  “I suppose you did. I never thought about it before. Thanks, sis.”